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Disaster Victims – The Sage Family
In 1910, John Sage, a baker from Peterborough left Britain with his eldest son George then aged 18, and travelled to Canada where they took a room in a house and earned their money working as waiters on board the Pacific Railway. During their time off, they travelled around taking in the sights, eventually travelling to Florida, where John fell in love with Jacksonville. He paid a deposit on a farm with the idea of being a pecan farmer and sent a postcard to his wife Annie, who had remained in England to run their bakery and take care of the other children. John and Annie had married in 1890,…
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The Great Storm- 1900 Galveston Hurricane
September 8, 1900 seemed like a fairly normal day in the Texas town of Galveston. Located on a barrier island 30 miles long and several miles wide, Galveston was a booming commercial port and posted close to 40,000 residents making it the largest city in Texas. That morning’s high tide had brought flooding, but this was not unusual for a town that was at the highest point only 8.7 feet above sea level. There were blue skies and although residents knew their was a storm coming, they didn’t think it was going to be that bad. There had been storms since the town’s founding in 1838 and the town had…
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Helike – Real life Atlantis
The sinking of Atlantis is one of the many famous stories to come out of ancient Greece. That area is one of the most earthquake prone in Europe, so it is not difficult to see how such a legend developed. However, the city of Helike was destroyed in 373 BCE by a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami mirroring the fictional Atlantis. Helike was located on the northeastern part of the Peloponnesian peninsula on the Gulf of Corinth in an area called Achaea. It was the leader of the Achaean League, a confederation of twelve city states and important center of trade. Helike founded colonies as far away as Italy and Asia…
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The Mary Rose
The Mary Rose was the pride of the line. Built in 1511, the battleship was part of the “Army by Sea”, Henry VIII set about building once he came to the throne in 1509. The earliest reference to the ship is a payment on January 25, 1510 to have her brought from Portsmouth to the River Thames. There is some debate as to who the Mary Rose was named for. Some people have suggested that it was for Henry VIII’s mistress, Mary Boleyn Carey. However, Henry and this particular Mary did not meet until 1520, so that possibility is out the window. Another suggestion is that the ship was named…
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Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
The sweatshop was a regular part of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Young women were crammed in basements sewing in fading light to produce pieces for little pay. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company was no different. Owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, they employed women to make blouses, which were then known as “shirtwaists”. The women worked twelve hours a day, every day, and were mostly teenaged immigrants and did not speak English. For these long hours the girls got between $7 and $12 a week. In modern dollars, this is $166 to $255 a week or between $3.20 and $5.50 an hour. The company took up the…
